[SOLVED] Swap Activation Fail

Question

I've been having this problem for a long time, and I'm really glad to have finally managed to get it fixed.  Here's what I did. 
Reformatted my swap partitions as linux swap partitions.  (Originally I think they were formatted as swap, but I later changed them to ext4, and when that didn't work I changed them back to linux-swap.)  If you can't reformat them using gparted, try using palimpsest--a.k.a. gnome-disk-utility--to reformat them and then use gparted to format them back to linux-swap.
Rebooted and everything worked fine.
I actually even wrote a shell script that would initialize my swap space for me, I just had to enter the super user password in order for it to work.  I also wrote a clisp script to handle the shell script that took care of activating my swap--just as a side note, the reason why I wrote a common lisp script was so that I could have it run both my swact.sh script (the swap activation script) and my ensur.sh script (which ensures that skype continues running--skype often seems to crash from a problem with the preload for my webcam.  The script just automates the process of restarting skype every time it crashes.)

Answer 1

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x77777777
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 5 40162 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 6 71 530145 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 72 1091 8193150 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 1092 14593 108454815 83 Linux